Session #39 recapped, Session #40 announced

The SessionMario Rubio has recapped The Session #39: Collaboration, and Erik Myers has issued marching orders for #40 on June 4: Session Beer.

There are a thousand ways to approach this.

What is your definition of a session beer? Is it, as Dr. Lewis suggested at the Craft Brewers Conference this year, “a pint of British wallop” or is your idea of a session beer a crisp Eastern European lager, a light smoky porter, a dry witbier, or even a dry Flemish sour?

Is it merely enough for a beer to be low alcohol to be considered a session beer, or is there some other ineffable quality that a beer must hold in order to merit the term? And if so, what is that quality? Is it “drinkability”? Or something else?

What about the place of session beer in the craft beer industry? Does session beer risk being washed away in the deluge of extreme beers, special releases, and country-wide collaborations? Or is it the future of the industry, the inevitable palate-saving backlash against a shelf full of Imperial Imperials?

What are some of your favorite session beers? When and where do you drink them? If you’d like, drink one and review it.

For additional preparation visit Lew Bryson’s Session Beer Project.

The Session #39: Collaborative learning

The Session
Kelly Ryan spoke with a surprising sense of purpose considering this April evening had just turned into tomorrow in a Chicago hotel room, and lord knows what day it was 8,000 miles away in Auckland, New Zealand, where Epic Thornbridge Stout was still conditioning.

“I think it needs more time in the tank,” Ryan told Luke Nicholas after tasting the beer for the first time since they brewed it in February. He liked what was in his glass, but his experience with brown malt — a key ingredient in the recipe and one Nicholas had not used before — told him it wasn’t time to bottle the beer. Nicholas reassured him that what he was tasting had been bottled weeks before so he could bring some to Chicago. The rest was still maturing.

Luke Nicholas and Kelly RyanThat’s what’s called collaboration.

The theme for the 39th gathering of the Session today is collaboration — Mario Rubio is this month’s host and will have the recap — and I expect various bloggers to come at it from many directions. Let’s just hope we don’t hear the story of Avery/Russian River Collaboration Not Litigation Ale too many times.

I’ll try to keep it simple. Nicholas is founder and chief bottle washer at Epic Brewing in New Zealand. Ryan, also a native of New Zealand, is brewery manager at the Thornbridge Brewery in England. They met last year when Nicholas was in England and ended up brewing a collaboration that melded, although that might not be the right word, Epic IPA and Thornbridge Halycon.

Since Ryan would be in New Zealand in February for his brother’s wedding they decided to brew another beer, in this case a stout, a style Nicholas had never made. This was also his first experience with brown malt and two English hop varieties, Target and Bambling Cross.

“I woke up excited to go to the brewery,” Ryan said. “(The process) energizes you. A mass of information goes back and forth.”

The resulting beer is plenty stout, 6.8% abv with 54 bittering units, and even at a young age in early April full of textured flavors, smooth but complex. Half the batch has been packaged and hit the market last week. Half is aging in American oak barrels that previously held Epic Armageddon IPA and likely will be released at the end of August.

Both Nicholas and Ryan judged in the World Beer Cup in Chicago in April, and they spent plenty of time together during the following days at the Craft Brewers Conference. Information flowed freely, but not necessarily the way it would formulating a recipe or standing over a mash tun in the brewery. Nicholas calls what happens during brewing collaborations a cross pollination of ideas, and it breeds better brewing.

Collaborations are good business, good marketing, good fun and often result in interesting beer. They also make for good stories in print and cyberspace for those who haven’t already heard them a thousand times. When they start to seem old remember the stories may be repetitive, the experiences are not.

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The photo above was taken at CBC. Luke (on the left) is mugging for one camera, Kelly for another, and that object between them is an unlabeled bottle of Epic Thornbridge Stout they are about to open. Clearly a historic moment. You might find pictures documenting the brew day more informative. Details about the beer itself are here.

Do we blame the beer or something else?

We interrupt the silence here for two quick links.

In fact I’d collected a bunch of stories during the last several days that I put the much of the beer world at arm’s length (in other words, I could still reach for a pint). I planned a “beer linkorama” today. There’s the madness in San Diego to comment on, Slate’s take on the Miller Lite ad campaign, several interesting blind tastings, more on corks, etc. But you’ve probably already seen those things.

Instead I suggest you start with Pete Brown’s “CAMRA’s noxious culture of entitlement.”

Read the comments, give it some thought.

Before you dismiss such boorish behavior as specific to a few bearded oafs in the UK consider the question it provokes from Alan McLeod: “Where Else Hides The Culture of Entitlement?”

This isn’t just about beer and I don’t think it is a generational thing, but I suspect you can easily add to Alan’s list of five.

The Anchor way: ‘Big is not always better’

If you, like I, think fresh Anchor Liberty is still one of the best beers on earth then the announcement that Anchor Brewing has been sold makes a difference on a very personal level.

In terms of the Future of Craft Brewing overall? Not so much.

Not like it would have between 1965 and 1977, when Anchor accounted for 100 percent of sales of what we now call “craft beer.” In 1980 Anchor sold 81 percent of craft beer and still more than half of it in 1984, just before Jim Koch and Samuel Adams beer arrived. Five years later Koch’s Boston Beer Co., at the time contracting to have its beer brewed at struggling old-line breweries with excess capacity, vaulted past Anchor into the No. 1 spot.

Anchor production peaked at 108,000 barrels in 1996 and began to slip a bit by 1998, at which time it accounted for less than 2 percent of “craft” production. Today Anchor brews less than 5 percent of what Boston Beer makes and about 1 percent of the craft beer.

To be clear, Fritz Maytag and Anchor cast outsized shadows. Maytag’s place in history is, well, Maytag’s place in history. We can only guess what beer choices American beer drinkers would have today had he not saved Anchor Brewing in 1965. But whatever the new owners do — and as Jay Brooks writes this new stewardship begins somewhat oddly — it hardly seems likely any changes will reshape the craft beer landscape that Maytag shares great responsibility for creating in the first place.

I’ll leave it to others to speculate about that and to recount much of what Maytag, who remains as chairman emeritus, and everybody he worked with at Anchor accomplished. Instead I suggest considering something he didn’t do.

In 1992 Maytag investigated the possibility of a direct public offering to raise funds for expansion. At the time the five largest small breweries in the country were Boston Beer (273,000 barrels sold), Anchor (82,654), Sierra Nevada Brewing (68,039), Redhook Ale Brewery (49,000) and Pete’s Brewing (35,700).

Bo Burlingham provides the history in “Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big,” writing, “Besides, the company would eventually have to move up to the next level. It was the natural order of things. Every business has to grow or it dies, right?”

Then Maytag changed his mind. “I realized we were doing the IPO out of desperation — because we thought we had to grow,” Burlingham quotes Maytag. “It occurred to me that you could have a small, prestigious, profitable business, and it would be all right . . . So we made the decision not to grow . . . This was not going to be a giant company — not on my watch.”

By 1996, when Anchor sales peaked, Boston Beer had grown to 1.2 million barrels a year. Pete’s Brewing, which also sold beer brewed under contract, rocketed to 425,600 (its top), while Sierra Nevada (265,000) and Redhook (224,578) both more than doubled Anchor.

Ten years later Maytag was interviewed by USA Today. “Big is not always better,” he said. “Small companies like ours can still knock ’em dead.”